A Fremen's Joy
by P.T. O'Talryn
Summary: A renegade Fremen girl escapes her degenerate tribe into a vision quest of no certain outcome.


A Fremen's Joy

By P.T. O'Talryn

Question: What horrifies a Fremen the most?

Answer: A swamp.

-Fremen riddle

_I am an alien in my own land_

_The future has rushed into the subjective_

_I go out walking_

_I breathe in through my veiled mouth_

_And out through my nasal catheters_

_My knife is near enough to hand_

_Up ahead sits an alien beggar_

_I stop and read his ink and cardboard sign_

_My hand extends to greet his_

_His roughened brown-backed palm is warm_

"_How are you?" I say_

"_I'm alright; doin' okay," he says_

"_You seek coin," I say_

"_Sure," he shrugs_

_I drop some silver into his palm._

_Odd how they still use these things._

_My tread recycles enough moisture_

_I drink from a catchpocket_

_My elbow is leaking_

_This old suit needs repairs_

It always came back to ancient Terra for her, but she didn't know why. _Adab_, the insistent memory that brooked no refusal, especially mel-adab, from the spice trance that took one beyond one's own lifetime, moved her mind in mysterious ways, when she was bodily alone in the apotheosis of all deserts – _her_ desert – here, now, boots pressing into the pale yellow multitudes of particles of undone rock, swept endlessly by the –

I went through the desert on a horse with no nameIt felt good to get out of the rainIn the desert, you can remember your name

_Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain_

None of which was strictly true, she note on _simulflow_ – simultaneity of thought processing – as she hupped air through her veil and snuffed moisture into her nose-plugs. She knew the name of the "horse" she rode through the desert quite well by now, and the twee double negative of the fourth line of the ancient song just recalled pushed past the basic negative connotation to indicate that there was, indeed, someone to give pain, and to return it gratefully.

"Katrin Hel Horse Dean," she said aloud to the billowing air and exceedingly soft abrasive texture of the airborne granules. The desert was no respecter of names, or persons, and ignored her. She was not mad enough yet, to pull down her veil and donate moisture to the matter in a tantrum of impudent self-righteousness; so, she let the matter drop.

She was overly young to have gained her Horse, her true name, but, she herself had argued that–

"God i-"

_And then she'd been slapped across the cheek for uttering the filthy word, the corner of her eye registering the impact causing her peripheral vision to flare blue briefly._

"_The desert is no respecter of persons. If I can do said, I claim my fleshly name, and leave my given name to Christ. You cannot stop me."_

_The ad hoc adolescence council – her parents, the decaying Reverend Mother, her aunt-out-law and uncle-in-law, her multitude of pasty-faced, booger-eating cousins – stood there, primed to judge her. She could tell by a glance at how they glanced at her unflinchingly, their blue-in-blue-in-blue eyes, that they disapproved of her. She was too young, they must be thinking, she has not participated in the spice orgy, nor been examined by the water doctor, nor even asked after these things! She's been dosing herself against the proper sacrificial calendar._

She just doesn't fit in_, both she and her Father thought simultaneously, and each know that the other one thought the same at that same moment. Katrin looked about fatefully, and quickly, then bowed her head. The Master Within would deal with this problem, and she had faith in him._

"_If you choose a perverse path, after all those ancient rites, you shall have no warranty, here. You will be a puddle in the hall-"_

Corridor! We're in a "hall" right now, _she thought._

"_Or corridor as you might put it. If we don't put everything exact for you you refuse to listen to us. A puddle in a corridor, then, placed there freely, free for anyone to vacuum up into their still."_

_She closed her eyes for three seconds and then opened them in haste, her left buttock twitching with mild but telling sensation. Her lips rolled in to pillow-press against her top and bottom front rows of teeth, but Horse refused her the sickly pleasure of pulling the mouth-corners up to form a weak grin. This time, at Horse's urging, Katrin would defy both the Witch within and the Naib without with a single word._

"_Horse!" she ejaculated._

"_Know then that you're entirely not fucked here, from now on, forever, until you repent and undergo the spice orgy as specially administered by the Reverend Mother."_

_The thought of drinking liquid from that rotten old bag made her mental innards roil._

"_I suffer pleasure at your judgement. I am a son of the desert, now, not of your wb~itch." She spun the first letter of the last word to render it ambiguous in sound and, thus, crystalline in intent – implying her Father was carnal with the Reverend Mother. Her Mother's mouth set, but her Father surprised her._

"_You thank us…" he said, almost in wonder. Her insult had backfired; he interpreted the sentiment as an honour! So hard to break out of the webs families weave!_

_She hated to do it, but full ritual, here, demanded it; she spat toward her Father's feet. Her peripherals noticed that everyone in the room, save her, twitched their right lower forearm and wrist-hand at that movement as if to reflexively catch the moisture. Then, she left, clearing in her sinuses and allowing herself a wan smile._

Cresting the first dune, she craned back to see the sietch, now an ugly lump of high-jagging rock smoothed round one side near the base by a constant quirk of wind. A net of nerve response moved tears slightly closer to her ducts, but she suppressed the infantile pleasure-urge to push them into actuality. She turned away and trod on down the dune toward the sand-ridge younger.

_They are frozen_, she thought, _and I gained nothing from them except my life, a life I now squander_.

In the farthest distance lay the Big One, the ripply dune to end all dunes, humped up by the eternal forces to distort the horizon like a magic chain of perfectly humped mountains as it spread out broadly across hundreds of miles, and unguessable thousands of feet high.

Can a dune really stand that high, Father?

_I have no breast milk to suckle you with, Daughter._

The thought brought a rush of concern through her blood vessels, and she dropped to one knee to break open her mini-fremkit and check it:

Thumper? – no! No matter, her legs will do the trick, when she's ready.

Water? – no! She'd gorged and her catchtubes were processing piss and sweat already.

Crysknife? – no! They'd denied her that, at the last, but it was her choice to suffer such judgement. In a fight her limbs would have to suffice.

Rope and Maker Hooks? - no! She'd ridden before, and captured a worm before, but this time they would not let a puddle in the hall make off with such prized tools.

Monocular? - yes! At least one thing that she claimed as hers, good to the horizon and even a touch beyond.

Food? – yes! A disgustingly thick spice sandwitch wrapped in waxen spicefibre.

And that was all. Enough raw spice to intoxicate six sietches and used as spread for a sandwitch, along with a monocular, strapped tightly into a small leather grandmother kit. The touch of that wrinkled pale leather brought another adab,

"What do you bring into the desert, Kattie?"

"_Only what I need and nothing that I don't!"_

"_Very good. Now, feel here," her Grandmother said, pulling aside her robe daintily to reveal her pale fishbelly. Katrin put a hand as bidden. The skin was softer than expected, and a little cool._

"_That's going to be a grandmother kit for you when I die and my mind parts from my body. That way you'll always have a bit of me around to take care of you."_

"_Don't die, Grandmother!" Katrin pulled her hand away and tugged at her Grandmother's robe._

"_I'm not going to die for a long while yet. But all shall die in time, and I'm the oldest, so it's fair that I'm first."_

"_Dying isn't fair!"_

"_Now, now, what's fair about living?"_

"_I don't understand."_

"_I mean, why are we here? Are we here to enjoy our senses? Or are we here to love one another? Or are we here…for something else?"_

_Her Grandmother got up and puttered into the kitchen, Katrin following, and produced a sweet wafer. Katrin's mouth began watering and she suddenly realised what had just happened. She was torn – spit out the water and waste it into the sietch, or swallow it as shameful addiction to flesh-pleasure. Her Grandmother saw her consternation and bent down toward her._

"_Take the wafer and use your water as it wills. Your little flesh doesn't need to grow up so quickly; your mind is growing up much too fast as it is. I've never met a girl – or a boy, for that matter – who worried about dying at seven years old as much as you do."_

She shouldered the lovingly crafted kit and trod on.

_There might be water beyond_, she thought.

_Then why no odour? Crosswinds? The clouds don't bear that out. Perhaps water isn't olfactory-detectable at horizon-distance._

She stood, now, in the Elvis Basin, not made of open rock but, rather, rocky bones buried deep in the sand to mould and found the massive, steep dunes that surrounded and formed a delicious deep valley with ample soft flows and rills and humps and subtle dark beige-yellow small ridges joining up with the curvilinear walls – a wonderland of sand abetted by a natural windtrap effect that solidified it all a little better by virtue of a hint of moisture.

In its wind-sheltered comfort, under the starshot black sky, a whole lot of rolling in the sand had occurred here; trios of lovers would always run out across the fearful wastes – often intoxicated – following the glowflag planted at the basin's top whipping loopily in the wind. Once out of the stinging wind in the comfort of more still breezes, two of the lovers would tear ignorantly out of their stillsuits and have at each other; the third would lie down some distance away out of sight but not earshot, usually belly and breast pressed to a gentle slope of sand. Worms had been known to devour a sleeping man after keying merely on his rhythmic heartbeat. Lovers risked their own unified rhythms being detected by the Shai-Hulud, hence the third person to add a confusing third heartbeat as a desert shield.

When she was nine she – what should she even properly call herself, now? Horse? Katrin? Khed to pronounce KHHD? – agreed to come along as a shieldgirl on one such midnight expedition, in exchange for a tiger-striped sandtrout kept in a special antique cage of silver. She spent the night hearing noises fools might call loving, and playing gingerly with the trout-in-the-box, making love with the sexless thing in an alien, childlike fashion yet with sturdily adult sobriety, as it sought the moisture in her exposed right hand and forearm. Its underside felt like five hundred snail tongues rasping and tickling and she practiced neuromuscular stillness as it moulded to her skin until she felt panicked and chose to bear no more that she not bid her flesh to suffer for no reason – she allowed herself a girlish squeal and poked it off of her with her blunt knife and it scrounged around the sand, sulking, always – as if by magic – hydrolocating the direction of her exposed forearm-hand and grudgingly moving in that direction once more. Just as she became bored, the pair became satisfied and yielded their sound to the blissful exhaustion of the desert silence.

Only five years later, and branded a pervert, yet, did it occur to her the common reason why a desert shield might bring a sandtrout in a box here to pass the time.

_My name is Horse, and I am a boy._

_How can you be a boy if you're a girl?_

_My mind is a boy. Call me a tom-boy, then._

_Do you want your flesh to be a boy, too?_

_No._

_Do you want to marry a boy?_

_No. I want a man!_

_You are a strange one!_

_My name is Horse. I ride my body, which is a girl named Katrin Hel Dean._

_One day I might marry, but not of my degenerate tribe. I will marry a man and would that his mind be a woman._

"_It's called cognitive inversion, Horsey," _spoke her Grandmother.

Adab –

Horse remembered her Grandmother, a memory that woman never related whilst bodily alive – why would she have? – of being raped by a Harkonnen scout. It was an ambush: her Grandmother appraised the battle as hopeless and, so, buried her knife in the sand beneath her, undid her suit at the waist, pulled a flickknife – the kind where the blade pops out from the hilt at the push of a button – then threw herself down and mock-stabbed herself in the heart, as if a suicide, holding her fist and hilt in place against the wound. A Harkonnen dog came by, saw her condition, grunted, and had his way with her anyway. She just wanted the moisture, of course; as soon as he'd satisfied himself she stabbed him in the back of the liver up into his lung and shoved him off of herself. He was worth that much to her. His party abandoned the dead, allowing her to loot the field and escape.

Memories of such indefatigable practicality and keen adventurousness hurt her by comparison. Her flesh had never felt this way – Horse, Katrin, what was its name, now, again? – this twisting impotence, unsettling the buttocks in the sand, sideways arching of the ribcage – how would she escape this zero position?

_This is one of the antechambers of Hell, _she thought._ This is what old Terra experienced, what all children of degenerate times experience – forgetting what it meant to be Fremen, and realising that this forgetting is even happening at all, becoming self-conscious of the rot within that spawned you. Forgetting what it meant to be a true human being and not merely _homo sapiens _as we once classified ourselves. The sense of smallness…the reduction of the creative powers until even attempts at describing them erode into particles small enough to be carried away by the weakest desert winds. The legs can't even ache with longing, they have but velleity…_

_Save me from this pointless purgatory, oh, Lord!_

_Lord? Nay, I am your Lady, Horse._

_I am lost without you, O Lady!_

_Indeed, you are._

_My life for you!_

_Nothing so vulgar. We must wait._

_Waiting is painful!_

The wind blew weakly. The eyes blinked. No need for a visor, yet.

Lady?

The window blew more weakly.

Inhale and, then, a single snuffing sigh…

Arms came round to caress her chest, feeling the moulded stillsuit round the perked breasts, the solidity of ribs beneath to the side, and finally coming to rest cross her heart. _Your name, little one, is Katrin. Horse is your name for me, and I am your lover, and your Lady, and your Messiah. Accept me and become your ancestors, who are also your posterity._

_Go back in time, O Lady?_

_The past and the future are one thing: pure potentiality, cast into the daylight present you know as the simultaneity of eternity. The past can be changed because its _outcome _can be changed. Come with me if you want to change the past, if you want to honour your Grandmother who accepted Harkonnen water for the sake of her own Fremen joy._

She stumbled out of their sietch territorial perimeter, then, into the open desert. Big risk of worms, here, now, but too few spice blows in this area to bother summoning fear. Her calves and feet followed the chaotic drifting of the sands in a walk without any rhythm a worm would attend to.

_I thought I had the joy, like a piece of pink bubblegum, firmly in my clutches, in a place secure and sealed near my heart, but, I check, and it's not there any more, and I forget what it looks like. My memory of it dissolves away; it melts out of my grasp._

_Now, it's as if I'm thirteen years in my past, back when I was one and trying to hack out useful words onto my typewriter-computer._

_I hope my joy returns._

_A Fremen's joy lies not in mere freedom, but in that energised freedom of creativity reflected back at him in the faces of his comrades. His joy lies in teaching and discovering, whether he be the teacher or the discoverer, or both, at any given time._

_I say these words without passion._

Horse lies in a grey zone, her body threatening itself, helpless against the flesh being controlled by the spirit and the spirit helpless against mind control by evil influences. Who knows what she will do? She hears the humming of the dunes.

_Joy is hope of love. What hope of love do I have? I can catalogue my depression and my non-amnesiac fugues and their consequences – spice withdrawal and spice overdose, respectively – but I remain in these mental doldrums, without love or even felt hope of love, and, so, without joy._

_Only Christ can help me, that leader from the vanishingly distant past who assassinated that vile Empire of his day, the Empire of vain worship of the insane Great Goddess, whatever name she assumed at the time._

_Grandmother, I have dishonoured you!_

_I am not your Grandmother, you wretched fool! I am your Mother! I cry tears of blood for you._

_Mother, I drink your blood!_

_I am your lover, Katrin –_

_Yes._

_Your Lord –_

_Yes._

_Your Christ._

_Yes. My life for you!_

_Whatever image one has of God, is wrong, for God is beyond all conception; the finite and temporal consciousness can only conceive of the infinite and eternal consciousness in terms of error. All human conceptions of God therefore share identity with the subconsciousness, and, therefore, with the mother image each human carries within from his earliest lucid days. Understanding God is an exercise in learned ignorance, of climbing metaphorical tier upon tier to become mentally more like Christ, more clear like his mind was clear, toward an ideal balance of consciousness and preconsciousness, and a minimum of subconsciousness._

_I listen, O Lord._

_Good. But, one's resultant conception of God, as if ever more accurate, is, in fact, ever more like a perfect display of subconsciousness, being a unification of mind beyond all divisions, our only memory of which is our subconsciousness as a blending, an overlap, of conscious and preconscious aspects of mind. The closer we get to God, the closer we get to KTHLH, the insane Old One(s) lurking within, the absolute negation of goodness, beauty, truth – the absolute opposite of God. We delve within deeply at our peril, for, in our imperfection we do not rise up into heaven but downwards into the depths of the mind ocean, down to unutterable pressures and unspeakable awfulness._

_Save me, O Jesus! I fear the depths!_

"_I am with you," he might say. I do not hear voices, but my apprehension of what he might say will suffice._

_Thank you, Jesus. I pray to serve you in strength; I pray my very weakness be useful. I pray – I know not what to pray, my prayers become entangled in each other, full of contradictions and uncertainty, like seaweed lightly floating and plastering to the igneous rocks of the unmentionable city – HUSH!_

Katrin shakes her head, knocking the almost-voice away out of her mind. That was nothing good!

How do I know goodness is good?

_Twisting, beneath the sea!_

She came out of the fugue with a shock, pulling at the vacuum of her noseplugs, mouth hanging loose. She had momentarily forgotten to desert-breathe, trying to sietch-breathe instead, nose-in, mouth-out. She felt like a retarded child with trainer-valves in her nose and mouth.

_Thinking is like a vampire_, she thought. _It sucks resources from everywhere in the mind, leading one astray._ She remembered the old rhyme her sietchmates used to taunt her with as a child:

_Mentatty Kat-tie!_

_Gonna be a fat-tie!_

_Ate so much she bur-rst!_

_Always thinks the wor-rst!_

Even though she could put any one of them's teeth into his tonsils – but there were always more to deal with, and it was too much to bear to consider adopting a strategy of dedicating all her mental resources to calculating how to exact revenge on them all. She turned to food to assuage the pain that distracted her from her thinking; rather bear shame than pain, and through that unsealed emotional door did she escape into her destiny as one worthy of her distant ancestors, the ones who broke free of their own age's degeneracy so long ago on long-lost Terra. For if they did not, whence cometh the drive to conquer Space?

Walking and breathing, two elementary pleasures she now reveled in. It wasn't orgasmic and it didn't need to be. Orgasmic release was exhausting, a trek up a rocky mountain. Walking was a gentle soughing wind, a rocking rhythm of the hips, knees, heels, steady and assured, always novel yet always similar. Breathing was a counterpoint, a refreshing and clearing of the lungs, a reassuring lovemaking with the stillsuit through the catchtubes. She could walk and breathe all day and all night, and she'd not be tired.

_What is the real me?_ She thought. _My parents, my sietchmates, they demand I mourn for the death of my grandmother. They demand water for the living – not for the dead, which I would gladly give, but for the living, for _their _dirty pleasure of seeing me behave as they do!_

_What is the real me? Under this mask of pale pinkish skin, there is the mask of Katrin, and under that, Horse, and under that…?_

_It's masks all the way down, girly._

"_Be real! Be the real you!" they say, but I don't know what that means. Underneath it all is just a blank space. The bowl is only useful because of the negative space that defines it, but shatter the bowl and where does the empty space go?_

_A childish conundrum. The empty space remains, can you not see it? If not, you could not see it to begin with, you saw only a bowl and what "empty space" it jealously claimed for itself._

_There is nothing underneath the mask except my self-interest, my will, my talents, my capacity for emotion._

About a year ago, at menarche, she started practising her "real face" and "real voice," by trying to drop all pretense, all emotionalism, all masks and simply "be" the "real her." Her face grew ashen dead and lines of concentration eased away from the plasticity of youthful skin. Her voice deepened two notes, then raised one as she adjusted to not putting on a role, and her sietchmates – never friends, not even as a child, save adults – teased her as sounding like a Guild recording. She pursued and listened to them as they arrived with the food shipments. That insectile buzzing talk aroused her imagination.

"Good: Frozen Fruit; Origin: Giedi Prime"

She knew – pardon, she'd _heard_ - of the nature of Giedi Prime. They were slavers, torturers, murderers, they ruled Arrakis and hunted Fremen for sport from their grav-skiffs. She refused the food, pretending it might be poisoned. Her friends knew better, even in their apathy. No Guild-marked shipment could be poisoned! The Guild would destroy anyone, anyone at all, who interfered with their quality seals. In the end, she came back to the table and sucked on the fruit and chewed the ice crystals imbedded in the yellow, green, and pale orange flesh.

Now she came into true Fremen country: the open desert of endless humping dunes, arranged in their rows upon rows diagonal against the soft, sere wind. She paused and pulled back her hood, ears perking with muscles few offworlders ever developed.

There was an ambient humming in the air. She was long familiar with this but rarely was allowed out this far to hear it. The music of the dunes, their sand-surfaces in synchrony to produce a hum. Each dune had its own voice, its own hum. She pulled open her fremkit and attempted to take out her spice sandwitch, only to find there was nothing but the wrapper. She looked at her wine-stained fingers, pulled down her veil and picked her teeth with her tongue, finding a grain of spice there. She picked it out with a fingernail and ground it between her fingertips.

_I ate the entire thing already…I've been walking with enough spice in me to kill my entire sietch twice over._

_A sturdy female voice moved from within: The spice's precise effects on the human metabolism remain undefined._

_I fear!_

_A male voice, that of a kind teacher she had when six years old, moved then: So are its precise effects on the mind. Speak the Mentat's Prayer if you want to live._

_I fear!_

_Another male voice, a more comfortable one, like her own voice but deeper by one register, spoke then:_

_Speak it, you little fool! And be true!_

_It is by Agape alone I set my self in motion, by the spice mélange the mind acquires truth, the eyes acquire blue, the blue becomes a warning: it is by Agape alone I set my self in motion._

_Now drink!, said Horse_

_Katrin drunk deeply, emptying her catchpockets._

_Lights were opening within her, each with its own hum. She staggered through the dunes, up one face to smush her elbow into the sand, cloak hanging half off of her. She shrugged out of it in an artless motion a martial arts master might've took pleasure in seeing but which in a Fremen teacher would always find something to criticise, lest he disappoint his student. She came to the top and stood looking without seeing as the humming upon humming upon humming filled her mind's ear, the humming sounding more like a babbling now, liquid, alive._

_This is the sea of voices within! They all want to become me!_

_Every dune, every face, every wash, every rill, every grain – said Horse_

_There is too much!_

_You took too much, said Horse_

_Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me._

_Ahead I see another wretch_

_Crouched back against an ugly store's wall_

_I see the eyes, the skin – racial kin…_

_He wears a long-sleeved pullover, hooded_

_He cradles one of their white bags_

_Ugly plastic fruit of this Pro-Future industrial hole_

_Within, is an – alcoholic beverage?_

_No…fruit juice, and a plastic pack of nuts_

_I pause, right hand on hip, left hand free, looking down_

_He looks up_

"_How are you?" I say_

"_I'm good. Someone gave me some stuff," he replies_

"_You look rough," I say_

"_You know, no one ever told me that before? Everyone tells me I look like shit. You're the first person to ever tell me that."_

_I crouch, and lightly clap a hand to his shoulder_

"_Count your pennies. Take care of yourself," I say_

"_I will" he agrees_

_I walk on_

_Asphalt walking's an easy rhythm, but seductive_

_I move my hips, postured at alert_

I prefer the shift of the sands

_But, I'll get the hang of it, in time_

The Harkonnen patrol picked her up at midday. She was sandblind for lack of undereye lampblack. There were under orders to bring some Fremen "alive and unspoiled" back to Piter De Vries for his examination. He had made the journey to Arrakis especially to survey how "the native issue" was being handled. The guards took their vicarious pleasure in imagining what that twisted Mentat had in mind, knowing full well he was far more imaginative than they were.

SINE DIE 


End file.
